Art by Ava Sophia Hiss So ran the headline of People Magazine. Forget about everything else – this is the biggest, most earth-shattering event of our current day. Forget about the government’s current dedication to dismantling itself, the collapsing economy, the mass deportations. Ignore those snotty boys with facemasks and rifles, the hotblooded murders, the dead-eyed plutocrats and their assurances of total annihilation. Pay no heed to the distant death tolls, the ongoing w

Art by Mahati Santhanakrishnan Surveillance has been a staple of the American experiment since its inception. What started as intercepting the Plymouth Rock postal service has mutated into a behemoth of digital databases harvested from the public en masse. But the government is not the only one watching. The people have their own form of mass surveillance: Gossip. The connection between private whispers and the DHS hunting for immigrants may seem tenuous, but US history shows

Art by Chassidy Stephenson In my youth, I was staunchly against gossip. I thought of gossip as a sort of infinite lie vortex. Because nothing that anyone said in passing would ever be fact-checked, the annals of the gossip economy would always be rife with the sorts of lies that could ruin someone’s reputation in an instant if they were believed. As I got older, I started to soften my stance as I realized that there was more to gossip than the infinite lie vortex. As much as

Gossip, Dating, Surveillance and the Apps that Fuse Them Together Art by Jordan Baker In our current cultural and technological epoch where matters of the heart are administered, governed, and corroded by the screen, it feels almost natural that someone would use those same digital means to attempt to mediate the dangers inherent to such a digitized experience of love. The Tea app was created in 2023 by Sean Cook, a white man with a Business degree from UConn. The Tea app –

She casts long shadows over me as I rest To love her is torture Alive and desperate, she builds castles from thread White towers, cocoons, endless stairs that lead to nowhere My creator, she bears me everything On this planet only we inhabit She hums as she dances so beautifully She spins spiderwebs in her sleep If she weren’t mine I would let them swallow her whole The delirium of power makes her fragile and angry One wrong twist in her plié and the facade will crack Sh

“Gossip Girl here, your one and only source into the scandalous lives of Manhattan's elite” - Opening voiceover to the 2007 Pilot of Gossip Girl by the anonymous blogger and titular character Art by Chloe Ho Growing up watching The CW’s Gossip Girl from my 700-square-foot downtown East Village apartment was like watching a show in a different language, the uptown depicted was a different world. The characters–high-school heirs and heiresses of the Upper East Side– lived in m

The Shibari Collection reimagines bathing as a ritualistic space for escape and eroticism, blending decompression, transition, and sensuality. The three piece collection includes a chrome dry brush with a braided blonde hair handle and a hand-blown glass bath milk & Epsom salt duo, finished with red silk rope, a flame-worked stopper, and a stained glass lid. Developed for "Eat, Drink, Sleep," taught by Prof. Dana D'Amico, the collection expands Isamaya Beauty’s playful, avan

Growing up Liberian-American the terms gossip and storytelling were synonymous colloquially. This connection between the way we tell stories and the way we talk about each other and ourselves is something I’ve been grappling with in my own creative practice. It’s possible that the impulse we have to gossip and the impulse we have to tell stories are born from the same place: the desire to express our personal subjective truths. In my last three years as a writing student at P

Spring 2026 Issue 1 XOXO Main Feature Art by Jodie Baek Everyone seems to be outraged and I, a naked spec trapped in a waiting room, am dumbfounded by the darkness of the U.S. In the wake of the release of the Epstein Files, any and all of Trump’s heinous decisions, and ICE acting essentially within the same framework as slave patrols of the 18th and 19th centuries, it is made abundantly clear that protection is afforded only to the elite, and weaponized against women and

March 30, 2026 Newsletter Dearest Prattlers, This week’s newsletter features Junior Writing major Sydney Brewer’s insights on music streaming platforms and how they alter our relationships to music. Sydney Brewer (she/her) is a third-year writing major. She writes prose-poetry and fiction about diasporic experiences, language, and memory. Without further ado, here is Sydney’s newsletter, The Cost of Streaming @donaldoivanbarber/TikTok / Adobe Stock / @miss.mia777/TikTok Follo